The 100 Most Famous Paintings of All Time Oil Painting Reproductions

What the second fifty adds

Depth, mostly. Vermeer goes from three paintings to six, adding The Milkmaid, View of Delft, and The Geographer. Millet arrives with the trio that defined French peasant painting: The Gleaners, The Angelus, The Sower. Bruegel gains Hunters in the Snow, The Tower of Babel, Netherlandish Proverbs, Peasant Wedding, and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Raphael contributes The Sistine Madonna, whose two bored cherubs at the bottom edge have long since escaped the painting entirely, and The Transfiguration, left unfinished at his death in 1520.

Abstraction, and where the list stops

The hundred reaches into early abstraction with Malevich's Black Square and Suprematist Composition: White on White, and Kandinsky's Composition VI and Squares with Concentric Circles. It stops near there for a reason: the list is limited to works in the public domain. Paintings that are unquestionably among the most famous ever made — Picasso's Guernica, Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, Hopper's Nighthawks, Magritte's The Son of Man — remain under copyright and are not reproduced here. Frescoes and woodblock prints are also excluded, which rules out Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, Raphael's The School of Athens, and Hokusai's Great Wave: none of them is an oil painting, and none can honestly be reproduced as one.

American and Northern European painting

Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life, Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic cover the nineteenth-century American canon. Caspar David Friedrich, Henry Fuseli, Frans Hals, Carel Fabritius, and Ilya Repin fill in Northern Europe and Russia.

How the order works

The sequence is neither alphabetical nor chronological. The first fifteen carry over from the original Top 15 list. After them come the works ordered in the last twelve months, then those drawing the most search traffic, then the rest of the canon. Every canvas is painted to the width you pick, photographed for your approval before it leaves the studio, and shipped free worldwide.

Browse by artist

Four painters appear here five times or more — Vincent van Gogh with ten works, Johannes Vermeer with six, and Claude Monet and Pieter Bruegel the Elder with five each. Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci appear four times each. Beyond the hundred, the full catalogue of oil painting reproductions covers tens of thousands of works.